X-Prize

Its been a long time we have sent any probe to the moon….
Now the revolution is back, a number of space agencies are lining up their lunar program.
India is about to launch CHANDRAYAAN I, it has also planned for the CHANDRAYAAN-II , the Japanese space agency is also interested in sending their probe to the moon.

But the actual excitement comes in when you are given an opportunity to land a rover on moon and drive it to a minimum of 500 metres and you can be the winner of $20M.
Yes, Google and X-Prize have come together with this prize.
The major goals are:

1. Softlanding a rover on the moon and it should roam atleast 500 metres, and sends a “mooncast”(hi resolution digital pics and videos… it should be close to one Gigabytes of data)
2. The first prize is $20 M if your rover performs the above said task before any other rover anytime before December 31,2012. after that the prize money decreases to $15M if done before December 31,2014.
3. The second prize is $5 M and other bonus prizes, if your rover roams more than 5000 metres, and discovering water ice on moon, or locating any earthly object on moon,the most “ethnically diverse” team….

There is a large support available for the participants, like

1. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) of El Segundo, Calif., for example, will give competing teams a 10 percent price reduction on a launch aboard one of its Falcon launch vehicles - identified as "the first preferred launch provider" for the competition in a Google Lunar X Prize.
2. The SETI Institute of Mountain View, Calif., will make available its Allen Telescope Array to serve as a preferred downlink provider for communications from the Moon to Earth at no cost to competing teams.
3. The St. Louis Science Center in Missouri will coordinate a worldwide network of museums and science centers to take part in the contest.
4. The International Space University, based in Strasbourg, France, will conduct international team outreach and also facilitate the formation of a judging committee.
You may wonder,why should they organize such a competition, well according to the organizers, the private space exploration has a great market in the future, the participation from private candidates will ensure the implementation of very low cost methods of space exploration.

The most important part of this prize is the project should be privately funded,(no government support or subsidy is to be obtained)

X prize has already conducted some similar contests, last time it was to send a payload of three person to suborbital level(100 kms above sea level). It was won by Burt Rutan
The other contest going on is to build a super efficient car.
And in genomics, where every patient will have a personalized treatment based on his Genomic profile.(this project is supported by the greatest physicist of our time Dr.Stephen Hawking)

This is not all, don’t mind if you cannot build your own space craft and participate in the competition but you can still be the history maker…
The organization has also launched a LUNAR LEGACY, where you can send you photograph or message or both to moon, which will be taken to the moon by the winning team for a minimal amount of $10.

So if you think you have the necessary team to build the future of tomorrow come forward and claim your prize…

Links
copy and paste the address on the address bar of your browser....

X-Prize – home page
http://www.xprize.org/

Google lunar prize page
http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/

If you can build your own super efficient car,then this page is for you
http://auto.xprize.org/

To review the draft guidelines
http://auto.xprize.org/auto/automotive-x-prize/draft-guidelines

To participate for the automotive x-prize
http://auto.xprize.org/auto/take-action

The genomics X-prize- homeoage
http://genomics.xprize.org/

Registration form for genomics Xprize
http://genomics.xprize.org/files/downloads/genomics/Archon_X_PRIZE_for_Genomics_Team_Registration_Form.pdf

Genomics Xprize competition guidelines
http://genomics.xprize.org/files/downloads/genomics/Archon_X_PRIZE_for_Genomics_Competiton_Guidelines.pdf

Space Xprize – homepage
http://space.xprize.org/lunar-lander-challenge/

To participate in lunar rover space Xprize
http://space.xprize.org/lunar-lander-challenge/participate_sponsors.php

To send your photograph and message visit
http://www.lunarlegacy.com/index.htm

if u want to participate just let me know at Pankaj4bharat@gmail.com

All the best

Blessed be…

Columnar Transposition Cipher

This is also named as caesar’s box. This was not used by him but was only named to honor him.
This is one of the simplest of ciphers that has been used. Generally these messages have perfect squared number of letters. For example

B Y C T S I O O H S N U D E A G D E M G O E D E E

This message has 25 letters, now to decode it…
Easiest way is to create a matrix of 5X5 with these letters

B Y C T S
I O O H S
N U D E A
G D E M G
O E D E E

Now get the transpositional matrix by changing the rows into columns…

B I N G O
Y O U D E
C O D E D
T H E ME
S S A G E

Now write it in a single row…

“BINGOYOUDECODEDTHEMESSAGE”

“Bingo you decoded the message” this was the message…

Now you should have a pretty good idea of how to create your own secret message by using Columnar Transposition Cipher.

But not always the message have perfect squared number of letters…
Like “ THERE IS NO SECRET MESSAGES FOR YOU”
this is 29 letters… so now the next largest perfect square is 36 so create a matrix of 6 X 6.

T I E M G R
H S C E E Y
E N R S S O
R O E S F U
E S T A O



So now the encoded message is
“TIEMGRHSCEEYENRSSOROESFUESTAO”

Try to decode this

“WEESHTDOOTOULHGT”

“Yloemtmoeuseheuartneacvhctllaeoosponynmist”

Hint: try rectangular matrices as well….

Blessed be…

Codes and Ciphers

I have always been fascinated by secret messages and deciphering these message. When I was 12 years old I used to play games sending messages written in invisible ink.
This all started when I was watching Chandrakanta, one of the most watched television series on Doordarshan ( Uttar Pradesh board exams had one question from this series, well I don’t remember the year, may be 12 yrs back).

The king (Pankaj dheer) in the series accidentally picks a parchment in the bedroom, which was meant for her wife. The parchment has nothing written on it, but ironically the parchment flies to the fireplace and words surfaces on the parchment. This parchment was written with citric acid from the lemon. The first time I tried this with the extracts from onion, then with lemon, they all worked but most of the time, I burned the papers because I didn’t had any other means of heating the paper except for fire. Later I discussed this with my science teacher and she asked me to try it with a hair drier. It really works well….

You may think, why am I talking about invisible ink and stuff in codes and ciphers, well they are all interconnected. The main aim was to send message to other person, without revealing the content to anyone else.

In olden days in the Greek and Roman countries, the literate people used to send written message, it was in itself a hidden message because most of the people were illiterate but what about hiding it from the literate ones? Then they came up with different methods.
They created hieroglyphic messages understandable only to sender and the receiver.

Hieroglyphs are symbolic representation of anything. The ancient Egyptian languages are hieroglyphic, there are hieroglyphs in the pyramids and the Mayan buildings. When people started understanding hieroglyphs, the elite people created coded messages.

Some of them are columnar transposition cipher, commonly known as caeser’s box ( It wasn’t created by caeser, but to honor one of the first people on earth to use coded message was it named that way). The other methods are vigenere cipher and the tricode and lot more.